May 02 2009

How to Reduce and Simplify Bullet Points in PowerPoint

Bullet points illogical?

Long bullet points illogical?

How many times have you been cramming to prepare a PowerPoint presentation and it dawns on you that the bullet points in your slides are way too text heavy? It is very common for people to “brain dump” all of their ideas or thoughts into “stream of consciousness” bullet points as they create slides.

However, this creative technique becomes a problem when you fail to revisit your bullet points and simplify them so that your audience isn’t staring at a wall of text. It can be challenging to reduce and simplify what you wrote — but it needs to be done. Continue reading “How to Reduce and Simplify Bullet Points in PowerPoint”

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Mar 04 2009

Ten Commandments of PowerPoint Ninjutsu

Many business people use PowerPoint religiously each week. Although millions of PowerPoint presentations are being prepared and delivered on a regular basis around the world, it often feels as though “PowerPoint land” is a lawless “wild west”. Presentation audiences – big and small – have endured heinous PowerPoint sins for years.

PowerPoint users need to be held to a higher standard so here are the Ten Commandments of PowerPoint Ninjutsu that I came up with: Continue reading “Ten Commandments of PowerPoint Ninjutsu”

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Feb 02 2009

PowerPoint Template Secret Sauce

Secret sauce makes the burger and the corporate template

Secret sauce makes the burger and the corporate template

In a previous post, I explained why most corporate presentation templates fail to meet the needs of PowerPoint users because they are frequently created by people who don’t use PowerPoint on a regular basis. In my last article, I covered the basics of PowerPoint backgrounds and how they need to be designed in order to create an effective PowerPoint template.

If your background is designed effectively, is your corporate template ready for action? Not quite. There are a number of other important “secret sauce” considerations that go into creating a truly “usable” corporate presentation template: Continue reading “PowerPoint Template Secret Sauce”

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Jan 10 2009

PowerPoint Design in 2009: a Hammer or a Toolbox?

Do you have more than one tool in your PowerPoint design toolbox?

Do you have more than one tool in your PowerPoint design toolbox? (c)iStockPhoto/Gaby Jalbert

When Olivia Mitchell invited me to discuss what I’d like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009, she referenced a recent blog post by Laura Bergellis. In her post, Laura highlighted how we’ve shifted from detailed, bullet-point-riddled slides to simple, highly visual slides. She questioned whether the pendulum swinging from one extreme to another has replaced one set of problems with another set of problems. Laura asked whether we can somehow find the middle ground between these two approaches in 2009. Continue reading “PowerPoint Design in 2009: a Hammer or a Toolbox?”

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Dec 08 2008

Content Staging: Propel Your Slide Content Higher

Like a rocket, introduce your content in stages to propel your slides higher!

When you’re presenting your slide content, the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your audience with too much information on any one slide. If you find that you have too much content on one slide, you can divide it up and spread it over several slides. However, sometimes it’s not about simply breaking the content apart across multiple slides but about displaying the information more effectively in bit-size, digestible chunks in one slide. In these latter cases, I leverage a PowerPoint Ninja technique called content staging. Continue reading “Content Staging: Propel Your Slide Content Higher”

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